“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658During the spring and summer of 1656 Milton probably had his attention drawn
again to the activities of his younger nephew. In March or April John Phillips
edited and published a collection of ribald and scurrilous poems and lampoons in
the Cavalier mode: bawdy verses, suggestive songs of lovemaking and dalliance,
drinking songs, praises of tobacco, poems to Stuart royalty and court ladies, and a
few anti-Puritan pieces.^65 The Council of State judged it to contain “much scandal-
ous, lascivious, scurrilous, and profane matter” and on April 25 condemned it to
the fire; the Press Act of August 18, 1655 was directed primarily against this kind of
book, though it was only occasionally invoked. John Phillips and his printer Nathaniel
Brooke were fined and ordered to appear before the council, but there is no record
that they did so; conceivably Milton intervened or the council excused Phillips as a
favor to Milton. On April 30 copies of the book were burnt in front of the Old
Exchange.^66 Milton may, or may not, have seen this publication as a rebellion against
the values inculcated by his educational program and, he would have supposed, by
Phillips’s residence in his household as pupil and sometime assistant. This is the
kind of book Milton denounced in The Reason of Church-governement as the product
of “libidinous and ignorant Poetasters” who bring “corruption and bane” to youth,^67
and it was further subversive in evoking the ethos and personages of the Stuart
court. But classicist Milton, steeped in Martial and Ovid and Petronius, would not
be shocked by the contents, nor did he ever suppose that the way to improve public
morality is to suppress or burn ribald books. Whatever the psychological dynamics,
Milton and his younger nephew seem to have had little personal association after
this episode.
Edward Phillips’s first fruits would have been more acceptable: quite competent
translations (February, 1656) of two small Spanish novels by Juan Pérez de Montalbán
and an edition later that year of Drummond of Hawthornden’s Poems.^68 Edward
returned to London from Shrewsbury sometime after July 4, 1655 and was evi-
dently in frequent contact with his uncle, sometimes acting as scribe or assistant. He
presented copies of Milton’s Eikonoklastes and Tenure of Kings and Magistrates along
with his own Spanish novels to the Bodleian Library on June 11, 1656.^69 Interest-
ingly, his Mysteries of Love & Eloquence (1658), a conduct book for wits and courtiers
on “the Arts of Wooing and Complementing,” also contains a “new Invented Art
of Logick” whose organization and definitions are largely cribbed from Milton’s as
yet unpublished Artis Logicae, here simplified and presented as an English dialogue.^70
Later, both brothers took on other assignments for Brooke in the vein of Cavalier
licentiousness.^71
In May or June, 1656 Milton wrote to his erstwhile pupil Richard Jones and to
his friend Henry Oldenburg, now settled in Oxford as tutor to Jones, who was not
enrolled in any college but meant to read in the library and attend some lectures.
Oldenburg was eager to associate with the so called “Invisible College” of Baconian
natural philosophers and experimental scientists around Oxford. Milton’s letters
suggest that he was dubious about the benefits of the Oxford sojourn for either of